


i said don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till its gone

by llepolia



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alcholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Gen, Humor, Including being about to marry a woman as a gay man! Oops!, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pre-IT Chapter Two (2019), Repressed Memories, Sympathetic Myra, and its consequent trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28594380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llepolia/pseuds/llepolia
Summary: It's 2007 and Love Actually might have been onto something with all the airport talk for it all starts in LaGuardia.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Myra Kaspbrak, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 45





	1. Friday 5 to Saturday 6 September 2007

**Author's Note:**

> title from joni mitchells yellow taxi that was playing while i finally decided to post this lost gdoc of mine...
> 
> uuuuh theres like. stuff? i dont know how to tag? richie has a kinda panic attack (wait when a clown mosaic is mentioned!) and eddie mentions suicide in his inner monologue quite a bit and myra and him dont have great eating habits... idk like. b aware.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Eddie fucking Kaspbrak?" says a voice, loud and disbelieving, and when Eddie turns from arguing with Myra in the middle of LaGuardia's Arrivals there's a huge hairy bear of a man laughing and walking towards him. It takes a moment for Eddie to recognize him, fucking pardon him, he does not make it his job to know Comedy Channel jackasses enough to recognize them at 10 AM at airports, but that sure is Trashmouth Tozier.

"Eddie fucking Kaspbrak?" says a voice, loud and disbelieving, and when Eddie turns from arguing with Myra in the middle of LaGuardia's Arrivals there's a huge hairy bear of a man laughing and walking towards him. It takes a moment for Eddie to recognize him, fucking pardon him, he does not make it his job to know Comedy Channel jackasses enough to recognize them at 10 AM at airports, but that sure is Trashmouth Tozier.

"Excuse me?" he says, and then he blinks and it clicks. He has known this particular jackass his whole fucking life. 

"Richie?" He starts to say, and before he realizes it they are embracing. It really feels. Automatic. Of course, he would hug Richie, even smelling of airport. He knows this dude's middle name (Wentworth, Jesus, how does he remember this?). Richie's unwashed, greasy hair against the sensitive skin of his forehead, his ear, that vein that bulges out and worries him and Myra, is nothing. Once Richie had peed on his bed while they shared during their first and last sleepover when they were like seven and Eddie only got angry for like five minutes and then they fucked up the washing machine trying to fix it before mommy woke up. Eddie remembers Richie as a supremely gross person and he has never minded, what's some rarified air and shared germs between best friends? He doesn't even think about pimples, ah, fuck, there he goes.

Shit. But this is his best friend.

When they stop hugging (that felt too long? Was it too long? It felt good but suddenly Eddie can't remember how to fucking tie his own shoelaces, least of all for how long is it appropriate to hug your long-lost childhood friend) they are both laughing, kind of shakily.

"Dude," says Richie.

"Shut up, oh my god," says Eddie. "'Dude,' you sound like a frat bro. We are late into our thirties."

"Won't even let me tell him he looks fucking good for a corporate bootlicker, man, you haven't changed," Richie says, his eyes crinkly.

"'For a corporate bootlicker,' fuck you," Eddie can't stop laughing, and he clasps Richie's stupid Hawaiian shirt with two fingers. "Did you rob some fucking Floridian roadside shop for this fucking terrible thing? Are those fucking banana cream pies? Nevermind, not even the blindest of retirees would have such shit-ugly taste."

Richie smiles, very big. His teeth look pretty white, still, even with the shit diet Richie for sure has (the little beer gut Eddie's eyes can't help but stray to). Whiter than Eddie's, at least, and he passes his tongue over them. Dentist dad, that's right, an absent memory that comes back like it had never really left. Richie's dad had been a dentist. He had given Eddie lollipops and his mother had always snatched them out of his hands once they were out of the clinic. It had always disturbed him, cut him deep like how only a kid's hurts can, how she used to say, no sugar for you, sweetie, letting the lollipop fall into her purse, never to be seen again. He had been so sure, in that deeply bitter part of his brain that made him cover his head with his pillow in shame in the middle of the night as she snored next door, that she ate them when he couldn’t see. And then he had forgotten it like he had Richie.

"You're right, man. This is a Tozier original. It's my fucking merch, dude," he says stretching his apocalyptic monster arms out as far as they go (pretty fucking far, holy shit, giving chimpanzees a run for their money. Richie Tozier grew up and he grew up huge, and Eddie, that was usually pretty content with his everything in life, felt suddenly that the pit of his stomach rebelled and what he would normally worry were gases turned out to be emotions. Jealous, probably). 

"Oh, you bring in the big bucks selling this shit to colorblind assholes, then?" asks Eddie, desperately bringing back his eyes to Richie's face.

"Have a fucking red convertible to prove it, baby!"

Eddie groans, arms forgotten.

"What?" laughs Richie, again. "What do you have?

"Fucking Escalade, dude!"

Richie's laugh turns into a honk and Eddie thinks of summer sunshine and the Barrens. Had he really spent his days swimming in pee and who knows what else, listening to this asshole laugh to his own jokes, just like this? The two of them? It feels hazy, like that whole part of his life happened just before a nap, fuzzy around the edges.

"One word, Edward," finally gasps out Richie. "Compensation." And off he goes, laughing again. 

"I have two words for you: Fuck! You!" screams Eddie, also laughing. "It's so much more fucking secure! Tell me this fucking joke again when you get into a car accident and your brains end up on the road, I fucking dare you! Call me then, bitch!"

Behind him, someone gasps.

"Eddie!" says Myra and everything in Eddie goes tense.

"Uh, Richie, meet my fiancé," he says after a moment, letting go of Richie's shoulder (when had he grabbed it? When?). "Myra, this is Richie Tozier, we were childhood friends."

"Childhood?" blinks Myra, tentatively letting Richie shake her hand.

"Yeah, uh, back in, back in…" He can't fucking remember. "Back then. Been a while since we saw each other."

"Yeah," says Richie, suddenly soft. When Eddie looks at him again he finds him already looking, his caterpillar eyebrows a little bit furrowed over his behemoth of a forehead. 

"Right," says Myra, curt. "Eddie, I think I see my sister, come help with the bags."

"Man, didn't make the best of first impressions, I guess," says Richie as they watch her scuttle away. 

"Never really let that stop you, before," Eddie says, taking out his phone. "Hey. Are you in the city for a while?"

"Couple weeks," shrugs Richie, faux modest. "Have some shows and stuff, you know. Gonna be in Conan, the whole circuit."

Eddie rolls his eyes.

"Give me your number, let's meet up," he says.

"Really?" Richie sounds actually surprised. "But aren't your future in-laws here?"

"Yeah, that's why, asshole," Eddie laughs. "My father-in-law’s okay but Myra's sister's husband is the fucking worst, man, he's a Boston Irish cop, and they all have the same fucking personality. There's just so much Yankees-suck talk I can take from a badly repressed homophobe."

Richie's throat moves up and down before his hand engulfs Eddie's iPhone to put his number in with a little huff of laughter.

"Oh, that's dire, man, of course I will save you from such horror," he says. His cuticles are very neat even if his too-short nails say he never stopped biting them.

"Eddie!" calls Myra. In the distance, she's with her sister already, husband nowhere to be seen, but her dad is there, too, a tall, quiet Polish man solemnly watching him and Richie as his daughters titter. Eddie meets his eyes and feels suddenly unnerved

"Gotta run, Rich, man, but it's been good to see you," he says, glancing back at Richie. Fucking LaGuardia meet-cute, who would have thought?

"Yeah, sure! Text me whenever," Richie nods clasping him on the shoulder one last time. He's so warm, thinks Eddie, and next thing he knows he's helping carry Myra's sister's horrid neon orange bags.

"You know Trashmouth Tozier?" is saying Declan, the Boston Irish cop husband. "He's so funny! Do you know his joke about the tits of his girlfriend's girlfriends? Makes me lose it every time."

Jesus Christ, what the fuck even just happened?

\--

Richie can't stop staring at his phone.

"Tozier, are you listening to me?" says Emma, the scary little assistant Steve sics on him every time he's in the East coast.

"Sorry, I'm waiting for a phone call," he says. "Can you repeat that?"

But when she repeats, her tone scatting, the schedule for the next day, he's back to his phone screen. A call. He's waiting for a call.

"Okay," sighs Emma, snapping her fingers to get Richie's attention. "What is going on? Usually, I would just think drugs but Steve swears you're clean and you look too thoughtful to be high."

"Eh, I'm a conscious druggie," smiles Richie. "Years of practice, angel face. Plus, you know, I'm four of you, practically."

Emma glowers, like only tiny people reminded of their tininess do.

"You're six feet? Not King Kong?"

"Was there space in that schedule of yours for the Empire State? We could test the theory." The window of the hotel is all street, no skyline, but there's a cute little fusion restaurant just in front that looks busy and warm. A couple of men come out of it hand in hand and Richie blinks and looks back at his phone.

After a few moments of silence, he looks back up. Emma is staring at him with furrowed eyebrows, her phone hand slack.

"What?" he asks. He smiles for something to do. Emma usually rolls her eyes at him when he smiles at her but this time she observes the curve of his lips clinically before looking back into his eyes. Very fucking deep into his eyes. God, didn't even take him out for dinner. He could take her, maybe she would enjoy yelling at him some more over dim sums. Nah, she would just call him unprofessional for asking (they are not friends, they are not nothing, and the idea of her thinking he wants them to be something makes him want Pepto Bismol, who knows what it would do to her) and go by herself. And wouldn't that be depressing, to see the one person he actually knows in this city go to dinner without him? No, that's wrong. There's something wrong in that sentence, isn't it?

"Never seen you this quiet before," Emma says and Richie blinks at her. That is something alright. The Trashmouth, quiet. Richie doesn't remember the last time he- He feels his lip start to tremble and shakes his head to clear it.

"Can you email me the schedule? Promise to read it," he says, toeing off his shoes. As expected, Emma wrinkles her nose in disgust and starts to retreat. Feetcheese brings all the girls out of his yard.

"Want me to tuck you in, too?" she lets out as she opens the door.

"And kiss me goodnight!"

He doesn't have to look to know she flipped him the bird before she left. And then, it's his phone and him. Did he need it for something? The blue light of the screen must be doing wonders for his chins, even more for his shitty sight. He blinks in slow motion at his plain background (hasn't even changed it since he bought it, this wins saddest part of his sad night) and then turns his phone off. His eyes hurt and feel heavy, with thirty-something years of bad rest, a whole life, and before he knows it he's asleep in his clothes over the covers.

\--

Eddie wakes up to people walking up and down his house and groans. When they had bought the house, Myra had said, "Isn't it nice that there's room for my sister to visit?" and Eddie had said, "That's very nice, Marty." And they had bought the house, all three bedrooms, two-and-a-half bathrooms of it that they were still paying. And now Myra’s sister was visiting and Eddie hated it. This house wasn’t nice. Granted, he had been thinking that more and more since they had first moved in, like he had thought of dating Myra and then proposing to her, but usually it was silent in this big, expensive mistake and Eddie was masterful at using silence to shield himself, after living with his mother practically until he met Myra.

Someone knocks on the door.

“You awake, Kaspbrak? Got all your beauty sleep?” laughs Declan. “Come on a run with me, Myra says you’ve been going jogging lately, I wanna see you in action while the ladies make us breakfast.”

Eddie buries his head in his pillow. He could fake a migraine and have to stop Myra from taking him to the ER or go help with breakfast and get called girly like he’s back in middle school by Declan, all while his father-in-law stares at him. 

“Get going,” he says in the end. “I’ll catch you.”

“You sure you can catch me?” snorts Declan.

“Sure, why not?” sighs Eddie. “You’re just a cop, not a marathon runner.”

“Bold, Kaspbrak, I like it!” Eddie hates Declan’s laugh, hates Declan, hates the Mayflower for ending up with this man as a consequence. “I’ve put cuffs on people for less.”

“More running, less talking,” says Eddie getting up. This man won’t quit unless he hears him move. “Or the asthmatic fiancé of the sister of your wife will kick your ass ‘jogging’.”

He leaves the house fifteen minutes after Declan (Eddie dresses with calm, laces his shoes tight before stretching) and it takes him ten to catch and superate him. He lets his face blank as he runs but when Declan yells, hey!, as he sees him run past he feels a smile pull up and lets it change his face into something he doesn’t quite recognize.

Eddie likes running. He really does. Myra calls his runs jogging because it makes her nervous, to think of him running. Sometimes, she wakes up trembling in the middle of the night, babbling about broken ankles and statistics of pedestrians involved in car accidents. Everything scares Myra so much, which in a way is what Eddie liked first about her. Everything scared him so much, scared his mother so much, he had felt a kinship from the moment they started talking about the dangers of salmonella in continental breakfasts like the one offered at their job's obligatory ethics course they met for the first time. She had asked him for coffee and the rest had been history, as they said. Of course, the novelty of talking with someone that wasn’t his mom had made him forget what it was to live with her and once he and Myra had moved in together he had had to remember. In preparation for the wedding, they had united everything, their bank accounts, their retirement plans, their local government complaints about potholes, including their anxieties, and it was too much weight. It had always been too much weight, back with mom, and it was too much weight still now. So Eddie ran. 

He runs around the neighbourhood until he gets bored before putting on a brisk march to get back to the house. He passes Declan again on the way back and smiles to his face this time. 

“Fuck,” gasps out Declan when he finally gets back. Eddie has been waiting for him at the door, counting the minutes with badly repressed glee. “Wasn’t expecting a workout in the middle of my holiday.”

Eddie pats his back and rolls his eyes. 

“Come on,” he says. “You have to replenish your electrolytes.”

\--

Emma makes time for the Empire State. 

“Do the suicide prevention fences ruin the shot?” asks Richie as he pouts for Emma, weary photographer and C-list wrangler.

“What fucking shot, the only thing I can see here is your giant body,” she grumbles, and then over Richie’s laugh, “Like I’m serious, your fivehead gets cut off! There’s no skyline to be seen, Tozier.”

“The architecture of my man boobs is more spectacular anyway,” Richie jokes, bringing his hands up to cop a feel just as he makes eye contact with a confusedly disgusted mid-western mother and her very blonde, very burned by the sun tween daughter. 

Obviously, the photo Emma takes then is the best she has taken all morning.

After, sitting at some burger joint Emma had led him to after he had proposed going to Burger King to celebrate the morning off, he thumbs through the pictures and says just that.

“Shut up,” keeps saying Emma.

“No, really,” laughs Richie. “The composition, the light… It’s so good, Emma. You really captured my weird proportions and my shameful face. Took ages of Catholicism to perfect that one.”

“I thought you were Jewish?” asks Emma, and then as if she had realized she hadn’t been confrontational, she snapped. “Shut up, seriously, it’s just you at the Empire State! It’s not all that!”

“How does that go, ‘I’m a delicious half and half situation’ or something?” smiles Richie. “And the lady doth protest too much, methinks. It’s a good picture, dude, accept the compliment!”

Emma rolls her eyes (she’s gonna strain them at this pace) and takes the phone to post the picture (Richie’s big, oh, shit eyes, his hands resting on his pecs and the silver of shiny skyscraper with the sun reflex over Richie’s shoulder that honestly looks so good it seems edited on) on Richie’s Twitter. She doesn’t hesitate to write out “My GF left me because my tits are bigger than hers,” and then she leaves the phone, screen down, on her side of the table.

“I studied photography,” she says. “So I’m sensitive. Shut up.”

“Photography?” blinks Richie. “Like at college? That’s cool, that fits you, I think. Oh, hey, fries!”

Emma had ordered for both of them and now Richie is happy to discover there’s bacon with the fries and two little plastic forks to impale it viciously with.

“You’re not great at being Jewish, huh?” says Emma, judging him over the fry she has grasped with two fingers.

“Yeah, mom wasn’t really all that interested, and dad was really Catholic, like. He had a figure of Saint Apollonia in the middle of his dentist office. Tongs and all, you know? Really scary stuff.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “My dads are both atheists.”

“Cool!” says Richie, nearly choking on bacon. “I used to be friends with the son of the Rabbi!” And then he shuts his mouth with an audible click. 

Emma blinks at him.

“Okay?” she says. “Hey, you okay? You look really pale, suddenly.”

He feels lightheaded and he takes a sip of his soda to cool off. It doesn’t help, it’s all syrup. “I may throw up. Where’s the bathroom?”

The bathroom is the kitschy, colourful place he expects from a hole in the wall burger place people with photography degrees drag failing comedians to. That’s to say, there’s a mosaic of a clown on the wall made from recycled materials. Richie stares at its red nose (what kind of glass bottle is that shade of red?) and irreverent smile, cold sweat coming out of all his pores like this is a botanic garden and he’s the irrigation center of the jungle specimens, and an apparently hysterically funny part of his brain is yelling at him that wouldn’t it be cool if this clown looked him in the eye and said, “Let’s play hide and seek, Rich!”, if it grew sharp teeth and an appetite for human flesh, if it- If it-

Next thing Richie knows he’s in the supply closet. It’s dark and it smells like lemon. It’s a nice lemon, too, tangy but not very strong. Good taste in disinfectants. If he stretches his right hand out, one finger at a time, there’s a pyramid of toilet paper, scratchy to the touch. He breathes in and out until he forgets to remind himself to do so. And then he opens the door again. He goes back to the restaurant, stopping a server on the way to say that he’s very sorry, but he didn’t reach the bathroom and puked on the floor. He must look really bad because the girl even looks a bit worried and tells him it’s okay, that he should go sit down. Emma stares at him, just like yesterday, as he walks towards their booth.

“Thought the monster that lives in the sewer got you,” she says and Richie holds his breath as he sits again. “The fucking alligator they say lives under New York. You sure you’re okay?”

Richie laughs nervously.

“You wish,” says Richie. “Nah, I think it’s just the fury of God that is finally catching up with me.”

Emma looks dubious for a moment but ends up shrugging.

“Whatever,” she says. “Hey, you got a call, by the way. Some local number. I didn’t know you knew anyone in the city.”

“I didn’t think I did?” Richie frowns, grabbing his phone. There is a missed call that he can see. His stomach grumbles. “Hey, let's get more fries. Replenish what has been lost!”

“Disgusting!” says Emma, then smirks. “I have already ordered you some, I thought you would pull something like this.”

“Aw, you do care!” he smiles and pockets his phone. He will call back later.

\--

Breakfast isn’t bad at all. There are gluten-free pancakes and blueberries and even real maple syrup. Eddie eats with gusto and Myra, busy as she is gossiping with her sister, forgets to fret about all that food upsetting his delicate stomach.

Lunch is hell. Myra is obsessed with early, light lunches. Every night while they get ready for bed, she stands on her scale holding her breath for four whole minutes and when she comes down she always says, “Tomorrow, we will eat a lighter lunch”, as if they don’t eat iceberg lettuce salad with croutons and chicken and half a tomato each every day, and then Eddie says, “Sure we will, Marty”, and keeps on buying iceberg lettuce and croutons and chicken and seven tomatoes a week, to share. Obviously, when Eddie goes to take out their lettuce, croutons, chicken and tomatoes to prepare lunch today, he realizes there is not enough for their guests. In all their panicked preparation for this visit (Myra googling how to tell if there’s tykes in the guest’s room bed, Eddie cleaning the whole house with abandon to forget about the possibility of crawling little biting beasts), they had forgotten to go grocery shopping. 

“Let’s go out to eat!” says Declan, like a fucking dumbass. 

“At this hour everywhere good will be full, we should have reserved,” murmurs Myra to Eddie, who thins his lips.

“Well, you didn’t remember either,” he sighs, but he grabs his keys.

Getting into the city is always a nightmare. Eddie, knuckles white from how hard he’s holding onto the wheel, stares straight ahead as Myra shuts down possible restaurants (she refuses to be on her phone in moving cars, just in case, so Agata narrates Yelp reviews for her sister). If he so much as thinks of looking into the rear mirror he is going to make eye contact with his (still silent!) future father-in-law or, worse, Declan, who will take it as an opportunity to start a conversation, regardless that his wife is already speaking, and then Myra will have a panic attack because what if this distracts him and they get into an accident (nevermind that they have been stuck in a traffic jam for the last 20 minutes) which will make Eddie have a panic attack and- And there’s a very familiar forehead staring back at him from the taxi just in front. Eddie releases his breath all in one, and, carefully, takes out his phone. 

“Eddie?” asks Myra, in the sidelines.

“Just a moment, I need to check something,” he says.

Because under that forehead it says Trashmouth Tozier fucks your mom again, and again, and again!!! (three exclamation points too many, in Eddie’s opinion) and there’s an inkling in the back of Eddie’s head that says that under the R in his contacts there’s this shitty comedian’s number. When he finds a Richie he doesn’t recognize, all alone with no WORK or DON’T ANSWER after it, Eddie realizes his hands are shaking.

“Eddie?” asks again softer Myra, her fingers light on his forearm.

Eddie looks up at her.

“Forgot I had to call a client,” he lies, better than he expected. “Just give me a second, I promise I’ll be cautious, keep my hands off the wheel.”

He puts his phone to his ear before she can answer, chanting fuck fuck fuck loudly in his mind. The dial tone feels like an eternity.

“Heeey-” says Richie in his ear, sounding high as hell.

"Jesus fucking Christ," says Eddie and around him everyone gasps and crosses themselves. Fucking Catholics, lord. This is so not the moment.

"You have reached my, fucking, what's the name, I'm not home message!" continues Richie in his ear, still so fucking high. Eddie is going to overdose on his Benzos when he gets back home, he hates everything about this. "So, you know! Beep, beep! And sh-" But before he can finish his stupid diatribe, Eddie hangs up, calmly, gives his phone to Myra who sighs, and presses his hand to the horn with such force that he feels the groves of it imprint on his palm. 

"Motherfucking move!" He yells out of his open window, and Declan laughs, and Myra and Agata gasp and apologize to one another at the same time, and his fucking, goddmaned quiet future father-in-law opens his small, thin-lipped mouth to say, "Isn't that a dinner, there?" And like he's fucking Moses parting the sea the flow of traffic opens and shows him a direct way to a little greasy place. _And, you know, why the fuck not? An indigestion is what's missing on this day_ , Eddie thinks, on the verge of a mental breakdown, as he prepares to violently cut off the bitchy PTA mom van that seems to have had the same epiphany as him. Maybe he can get the shits and die dehydrated and never have to think of today again.


	2. Saturday 6 September 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After lunch, they stop a taxi. When they get in, Emma starts immediately to furiously text, and Richie wants to decide between losing at Snake or Tower Bloxx and gets distracted by his notification bar instead. There's that missed call, the local number from before, Richie had nearly forgotten. When he recalls it takes seconds for the person on the other side to answer, a brusk, hushed, hey, that has a name jumping to the tip of his tongue...<

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to my dearest kohl coles_cash on twitter for reading this over for me <3

After lunch, they stop a taxi. When they get in, Emma starts immediately to furiously text, and Richie wants to decide between losing at Snake or Tower Bloxx and gets distracted by his notification bar instead. There's that missed call, the local number from before, Richie had nearly forgotten. When he recalls it takes seconds for the person on the other side to answer, a brusk, hushed, hey, that has a name jumping to the tip of his tongue...

“Hello?” says the voice in his ear. “Richie? Is it you?”

“Uh, yeah? And this is?”

“Edward- Eddie Kaspbrak,” stumbles Eddie. “We met, do you remember? We met…”

“At the airport?” blurts Richie, mystified. Eddie Kaspbrak! There’s a face coming back to his mind, and these hands and these arms... “You looked hot.” Fuck, not that!

But Eddie laughs in his ear, sounding startled.

“I came straight from work I had an ink stain on my cuff, it was embarrassing,” he says.

“Eddie-ble,” says Richie. He’s said this one before, when he was ten or so. They were eating ice cream and Eddie’s (pistachio) had dripped down his arm. Richie had bowed down to lick it and made him shriek. “And cute! Nice dimples, asshole.”

“Bitch,” giggles Eddie.”You, you gave me your number, do you remember? Put it in my phone with your dump truck hands, and said I could call...”

“To hang out,” like a breath. There’s a pause. “I’m going to be here two weeks.”

“Yes, that. You said that.”

“And you said something about a son of a bitch brother in law.”

“Mhm, I’m with company right now, unfortunately,” hums Eddie and Richie can see, somehow, the exact way his eyes would glare at him if he was next to him, the exact smile he would have at the same time. “But we will revise the numbers this Monday at, say? Eleven? We can grab something to eat-”

“So what I’m gathering here is that you swear to your fancy suits finance people, just insult Wall Street cocaine addicts every day and get paid loads of money for it,” says Richie. “And sure, yeah, that works.”

“You should write that down, yeah,” Eddie even rolls his eyes conversationally. “And save my number, Dick. That’s K-A-S-P-”

Richie gasps, as he gesticulates wildly at Emma for a pen who just looks confused back at him. Write her down under the Don’t Fucking Want You In My Pictionary Team column in his brain, which he keeps with fastidious intent. Eh, there’s basically everything imaginable in the backseat pocket. 

“You think I don’t know the name of the woman I lost my virginity to?” Sonia Kaspbrak in vivid technicolour flashes behind his eyelids and with it a whole lot of childhood grudges. Fifteen birthdays, six of them Eddie’s, four Halloweens, one New Year’s Eve, countless snowy weekends and, for some reason, one summer day in particular though he can’t remember exactly why, and when he presses it feels inflamed and burns like an infected hurt. “I moan her name every night to the stars, oh, yes, Sonia, fuck, there-”

“My mom’s fucking dead, asshole,” hisses Eddie and then there’s as much silence as there ever will be in New York City. Eddie coughs. “Throat cancer, five months ago.”

Disorienting, reality. 

“I’m sorry,” says Richie.

“Whatever,” answers Eddie.

Richie is picking at a disposable vomit bag, right next to a notepad and, for some reason, a golf ball. He could puke and get it over with. Richie has a complicated relationship with vomiting because until three years ago he was basically an alcoholic, though he has always skidded cleanly away of ever calling himself that, and there’s something about drinking every other hour that had started to make this connection in Richie’s head, like once he had recited on bended knees his Hail Marys to the Porcelain God he would be fine and this, whatever this was (bender or internalized homophobia or before-show jitters), would end. It’s a long story, really, that ends with Steve and him halfway to the Death Valley National Park for a charity job and a talking vulture suddenly cutting the road to soliloquy at Richie and then, of course, a bougie L.A. detox clinic. They had had hot stone massages and everything. It worked, more or less, because now Richie only really does lines at parties with the buxom mistresses of cable TV producers and takes his CBD to sleep and has stopped hoarding beer in his fridge like prohibition is coming back in style. 

“Whatever,” he says back to Eddie, coming out soft. “You said Monday?” and he takes the bag, just in case, and writes down their date in the notepad with a little angry face next to it, to remember.

Soon after they arrive at the theatre where Richie is to tell dick jokes, tickets at 0.523 periodical dollars per minute for forty-two minutes. Richie hears Walk on the Wild Side as they turn towards the back of the place. He has sometimes thought he has a soundtracked life with his radio brain. He trips over nothing on rhythms unheard. It gives him the parallel thought of having a movie life, which implies a neat conclusion. Richie has done comedies, nothing major yet, they are still building up his IMDb, drones Steve when Richie feels too seen and incandescently angry that he had learned Shakespeare diction in his three years as a Theater minor (Telecommunications major) before he dropped out to end as a man in a dress joke bit in some comedy flick born from too many frat parties and just enough connections. So this is probably just the introduction, especially if he can’t remember his childhood. There’s someone with an iPod doh-doing while mopping the floor and a poster of Richie hanging from the door of his dressing room.

“Well,” says Emma. “We are early.”

“Right,” nods Richie. “I’m going to take a nap. Call me when I need to do, uh, whatever you need I do, honestly.”

“Right, that’s,” stammers Emma. “Sleep well, Richie. Call me if you puke again, okay?”

He nods and he closes the door really slowly on her face.

\---

In the end for lunch, Eddie had sat in a little squeaky booth of warm brown leather while his fiancé was talked down from a sobbing fit by her sister in the bathroom. His father-in-law didn’t stop staring at him and from under the loud buzz of his anxiety he had to listen to Declan being a stupid loud bitch for two hours and a half. He had eaten a terrible Cesar salad (really wet lettuce, not crunchy croutons) with the most delicious dressing he had ever tasted (had nearly made him cry, it was so good and this place so sticky). And under all of that there had been this recurrent memory of Richie in tighty whities in some sort of pond (something with Q, and it smelled like shit, all rotting and hot and gross except when they jumped down from the rocks and the wind filled their noses and ears). It had all felt like being underwater, the tightness of breath and the loss of the feeling of your limbs starting at the very point of your fingers because you’re deep under. Like a superimposed image over this pathetic last supper (his father in law in the middle, parting a bread roll for his daughters and making Eddie’s stomach roll in place), Richie grins at him with his mouth open and bubbles everywhere so Eddie opens his mouth to scream and what comes out is a laugh he has to hide with a discreet cough and a long sip of water. 

He couldn’t remember Richie’s face correctly, though, as much as he tried. His jaw was wrong, neither accurate to the kid Eddie had known in, in Maine? In the fucking eighties? Nor to the talking, laughing forehead wallpapered to the taxi that had been before Eddie in rush hour and that now he realized he had been seeing everywhere for a month straight. There was even that one idiotic coworker of Eddie’s, the Josh he hated the most from the unfortunate dozens that had to nerve to be incompetent in his vicinity (Wall Street was a commemoration of white America’s absolute shit naming conventions), that had been talking about trying to get tickets for his show and Eddie hadn’t even remembered.

Richie had had dark hair, thought Eddie desperately, and in the years they hadn’t seen each other it had curled slightly. He had worn black coke-bottle glasses, and he still did, but these ones weren’t, no matter what his brain wanted to say, held together by tape like they used to be. Richie hadn’t known how to dress for the weather and there had been winters where his cheeks had threatened to peel, red and swollen, and he had pouted and said it hurt to laugh, his lips hurt, and couldn’t Dr K make it better, come on, you, pucker up, and Eddie had thrown vaseline at him and Richie had played at being a condom but if the condom was one of those inflatable men that flayed around outside of car dealerships...

“Sir, here’s your change,” had said the peppy voice of the server, and they had all gone back to the house in silence, as if nothing had happened. Eddie had kissed Myra on the cheek chastely, murmured something about going for groceries and reversed so fast out of the driveway he had nearly forgotten Declan was still in the car. 

And then he had had a completely, absolutely normal conversation with Richie Tozier in the legumes aisle and bought a bottle of cherry liquor under Declan’s advice because he had said the old man liked it, so clearly a trap Eddie wouldn’t have fallen for it if it hadn’t been for Richie’s laugh (!) rattling around his skull.

When they get back home, finally, the low murmur of the television greets them and in the living room is said old man napping ram-rod straight in the armchair Myra had bought to have as Eddie’s seat (Eddie had always prefered to sit together in loveseats like the one in her bachelorette pad which had been purple crushed velvet and deemed juvenile when they had moved in together), and Agata, tired-looking, with her feet up on the sofa.

“Myra is upstairs,” she says, hushed, with her liquid eyes just like her sister's, and Eddie sighs and climbs towards the master bedroom.

They bought a Californian King and had to give up bedside tables so instead of the cute little table lamps with linen shades they had thought would go with the Provençal corner unit with rounded moulding Myra had carefully decoupaged they had bought two neat and clean IKEA floor lamps that bended and, honestly, the light was better to read before bed. Eddie approached quietly. Closer to Myra’s lamp there was a lump under two quilts and Myra’s mother’s favourite knitted shawl. The lights were off, even the IKEA ones, as they should because Myra gets migraines after crying, and when you closed the door you could forget there was anyone else in the house.

“Hey,” he says, sitting next to her and putting a hand on her back. “I bought cauliflower, we can make those fake steaks you like so much, tomorrow.”

“Declan will not eat that,” sniffles Myra.

“I think if I have to see Declan eat red meat in the sanctity of my own home I might commit a crime,” says Eddie. “I don’t know how Agata puts up with it, he does not cook it. He stained your mom’s lace tablecloth with blood for her last birthday.”

“I know,” says Myra. “And then he said to just put it into the washing machine! Lace! In the washing machine!”

“He’s so stupid.” Eddie shakes his head. 

Myra takes her head out from under the blankets.

“Eddie, I’m sorry-” she says.

“No, come on, I wasn’t being nice,” he interrupts her. “I’m sorry, I know how you are about cars and phones.”

“Okay, yes, but,” she sighs. “I think Agata is right, I’m worse than when I lived back home. I haven’t been going to work lately… I've been waking up before my alarm because I hear your car leave the driveway and then I just," her voice breaks and Eddie takes in a breath. "I just stay in bed thinking about you in that car and my mom in our old car- I'm scared, Eddie. I'm so scared all the time and I don't want it to ruin us, I don't want it to ruin me."

Eddie is moved by deep compassion to kiss her forehead. When she closes her eyes, her eyelashes flutter against his chin and it fills him with a tender feeling he had once thought was love.

"It's okay," murmurs Eddie. "It's really okay, I understand."

\--

That same night Richie ends in a gay bar drunk off his ass on, of all things, appletinis. They taste so good, Richie is weak to the knees with pleasure. His thumb keeps coming back to recall on Eddie’s number. Fucking little Eddie! With his little suit and those sharp little teeth… Richie is weak to the knees because of the drinks and because he’s on the bad side of thirty by his own doing. The bar has a wall of mirrors and in it Richie looks his thirty-two. Well, he looks thirty-seven, because he forgot to shave and he has ended up with the same laughing lines his mom has. It’s one A.M. says his phone, too late to reconnect with childhood friends. His back cracks when he straightens to flag the barman for another cocktail. Too late to think of childhood crushes, especially all-encompassing, paradigm-shattering childhood crushes. First love kind of crushes.

The person behind the bar is a hot twunk with a nose ring and a shitty little moustache. Fuck, Richie wants a shitty little moustache so bad. He wants to be a hot twunk instead of a mass of flesh and bones with a twisted spine. The barman keeps looking at Richie like he can’t believe he has the audacity to exist before his eyes and keep asking for appletinis like he has a hole in his stomach and Richie wants to tell him his stomach is completely whole, thank you, there’s this clinic that can attest to it, he’s just unbearably thirsty for the sweet and the acid punch at the end, especially for the acid punch. He longs to get sucker-punched and also to sink his teeth on a real apple, green and crisp.

“My favourite apples are Granny Smith,” he slurs to the barman. “What are yours?” and the twunk laughs and disappears down the bar without a second look.

Richie's hand wants to close around his phone but instead he finds his smokes. Close enough, and he angles for the door. Appletinis are nearly all vodka and then liquor. Deadly little things, sweet and sour. Richie, sappy bitch, can feel himself smiling. He can't call Eddie and he probably will, anyway. Wake him up and his fiancé and honk and chatter them both back to sleep. Eddie sharp-tongued in his ear. Eddie silent after saying, whatever. Eddie in bed, with a woman. Eddie that remembered him, fondly enough to call him and ask to save his number, this time. Eddie in a suit, so handsome at a funeral and the end of a church's aisle, Bogart and Grant and Glenn fucking Ford and the rest of men Richie had found himself wanting (so tender, all of 9) next to his mother in rainy days, and Eddie in matching pyjamas with his initials embroidered and the impression of a pillow on his cheek and his stubble and his wife-to-be kissing him and pursuing her lips and saying you should shave. God, Richie wants beard burn. He wants someone to light his cig, to angle him with his hips so the flame is sheltered between them from the wind that runs through New York aimlessly and Richie has seen Gilda thirty-five times, one for each year he's been alive and then some. He wants cancer, he thinks, as the point of his cigarette turns bright red-orange.

"Hey," says a voice behind him in the dark and from the shadows comes this man more or least his age. For a second there's the flicker of recognition in his eyes and then he smirks. He steps into Richie's bubble and he puts his cigarette against Richie's until they both are lit. "You don't come here often," he says after his first inhale. He has doe eyes and long eyelashes with mascara and his lips are painted blue. When he takes the cigarette out of his mouth with two fingers there's a circle all around it in lipstick like an alien gave it a blowjob.

"Well, no, obviously," shrugs Richie, and then, Valley girl. "I don't, like, live here."

"Right," smiles the man.

“You do, then? Come here often.”

He shrugs. 

“I’m not a regular, but clubbing is kind of like an itch, I guess,” he says and exhales smoke like a dragon.

"Yeah," nods Richie. He scrapes his shoe against the sidewalk and doesn't look at him when he talks. "Were you going to hit on me? Before you realized who I was."

"It's still the plan," he whispers. "If you want?"

Want, he says! But Richie checks his phone before. He should be getting back to his hotel, hoping that his voice isn't completely ruined. 

"Somewhere else to be?" laughs the man.

"No, I," and instead of the truth what comes out is: "I'm waiting on a phone call."

"Oh, some guy?"

"No, well, yes." Richie does not know this man. He's drunk enough to think that no one knows him. "My first, uh, like love, I guess."

"And does he know that?"

"Obviously not," snorts Richie. "Wait, you're not gonna sell this shit to some rag, right?"

"I'm honoured that you think I will remember this well enough in the morning to recount it to some seedy journalist," he giggles, flickering some ash away.

"Cool, yeah, because I completely forgot my NDAs at home," and then they are both giggling, holding on to each other when Richie stumbles. And then they are making out and they taste like smoke.

“So this guy,” says the man, kiss-slick. “This first love-”

Richie laughs to himself. 

“Yeah?” he says and then he concentrates on his tonsils. In the dark, they must seem like one. Like that one performance art piece his sister had adored during her art history phase. Two people with their lips sealed over each other until there was no more air and they passed out... A tongue passes over his teeth and they break away to breathe. It is not practical to hope to lose consciousness like a damsel in a novel, Richie does not do this enough for this to not be quietly monumental in its own right.

“What’s he like?” says the guy.

“My first love?” asks Richie, and he hums against his neck. “Well, I don’t know, really. We just reconnected. And I pissed him off, I think,” he snorts. “Hadn’t seen him in, uh, in years…” Richie closes his eyes, gets his fist against his mouth when it opens in a moan. “When, when we were kids, he was, god, I don’t know, he was all I ever thought about, I think. I don’t know if I even had friends or, or- I must have, right?”

“What?”

“Have friends? Like, at least once upon a time, I must have, right?”

“I don’t know,” the guy blinks up at him with dark eyes, Richie can't tell where his pupil ends. Will he share, whatever he has? They kiss again.

It's more or least now (or six or so kisses later) that Richie's phone buzzes.

“Your first love,” says the guy breaking away and slipping one hand down to grope Richie’s ass and the other into his back pant pocket. 

“What?” says Richie and then his phone is right before his eyes and he squints at the bright incoming call of EMMA ! (NYC). “Fuck.”

He disentangles himself from the guy quickly.

“So any reason why you’re not in bed right now?” asks Emma business-like. 

“Not any good ones, no,” says Richie, and scrubs at his face with one hand.

Emma is quiet.

“Steve said you were clean.”

“Haven’t taken anything, don’t worry,” laughs Richie.

“But you’re drunk,” she sighs.

“But I’m really drunk.” Richie sways in place, shivers as he stares at a streetlight.

“Tell me where you are, I’ll get a taxi-”

“Yeah, that’s not- I would rather you didn’t-” Richie takes a deep breath. Fear builds up with saliva and the diaphragm and the abdomen start to contract rhythmically. 

“Don’t be dumb, just tell me where you are, I won’t call Steve or anything,” says Emma really soft like he’s a spooked horse. He is huge and stupid and has fucked up knees, he guesses.

“Emma,” he says equally as soft. “Emma, that’s not it.”

She makes a wounded noise that she tries to hide behind a fluttering of papers and then there's this fragile silence like porcelain but when she speaks again her voice is stealy.

"You have two interviews tomorrow," she says. "The first one is at ten. Tell me now if I need to call to change it."

"Thank you," murmurs Richie. "Thank you so much."

Fade to black.

\--

At three AM Eddie startles awake from a gory nightmare where some, some thing had eaten his left arm, up to his elbow. Myra grumbles in her sleep and moves away, letting him regain said arm, asleep under her. And then it's him and his ceiling. When they had bought the house it had been popcorned or whatever the technical word is. They had both hated it because it is a ridiculously ugly finish (ridiculously sharp, sometimes, what fucking danger people just accept into their homes, like glass doors and glass fences and non-rounded edges in tables). So one day, after Eddie's mom had died and he had been feeling particularly brave, he had gone to Home Depot while Myra was in Boston with her parents and worked hard on top of a hand stair to get rid of that ugly shit. And then he had cut himself as he shaved the day Myra was supposed to come back, staining the bedroom carpet somehow which had made him feel quite catatonic and Myra still was sure meant he had hurt himself badly while doing that "dangerous construction job." So he closes his eyes and his brain, malfunctioning as it is, takes it as an excuse to bombard him with thoughts of Richie. Richie's laugh makes a strong come back and so does his one crinkly eye, something so new about his very, very new indeed face that it awed Eddie. He replays the hug at the airport until it fits well, like the feeling he vaguely remembers, and then, of course, he goes directly to Myra’s face when he had introduced them.

When Eddie had been just nineteen in college and he was taking Adderall to keep up with some girl he wrote essays for and then kept inviting him to parties, his dealer was this guy, Rusty, who, to his chagrin, had been one of the hottest people on campus. He only ever wore sleeveless shirts, even in January in NYC, that let the whole wide world look at his armpit hair, and he had one gold tooth, the mandibular right first premolar, that would shine under the streetlights of the library parking lot while he slowly counted his money or smiled, which he did a lot. The rent-a-cop assigned to that building was his uncle, a chubby, jovial man that took great joy in giving heart attacks to his nephew’s clients. So halfway through the second semester, Eddie is at this party with the girl, and Rusty comes by and says hey. He smells like beer and weed and sweat, Eddie can tell when he gets close to clap him on the back hard and then laughs at something mean Eddie snipes. The whole interaction doesn’t last more than a couple of minutes and then he’s disappearing back into the crowd and Eddie turns to the girl, Lisa from his one required English class, who is a Public Relations major, and she says, “ugh, I thought he would never leave, he’s such a freak, and he doesn’t even know how to dress. Who even wants to see that much armpit?” and Eddie realizes he’s probably more deranged than originally perceived. Anyways, Eddie loses his virginity to her that night and then she stops talking to him, so he stops taking Adderall, but he doesn’t ever stop thinking about Rusty (Jesus Christ, Rusty! He still can’t believe the name) or the face she had made that night when they had seen him, her nose scrunched up in distaste, her eyebrows unbelieving. He had tried it on in his room, afterwards, in case he ever was to find him walking around and he wanted to talk to him, and it had looked really natural, like his face was already used to contorting that way. Of course, then Rusty had dropped out and he had never had to use the face. Instead, he had received a message saying sorry, man, life's too heavy, we can hang out if you want, though, and the name of a friend who was taking over the business, which had been much easier to ignore.

If Eddie were to breach his carefully constructed peace of mind and finally analyze the heaps of forgotten memories that were Richie and the solid proof of him the other day, and then Rusty, after him Ignacio and his junior Stats professor (had a little earring), and Daniel from post-grad, and Lamar and Mikey from his first finance job, and the bad boy from the soap opera Myra watches (mostly just skin and bones and strategically placed car grease), and probably, and this is horrifying for a multitude of reasons, Jack Torrance, the results would be irrefutable.

Next to him, Myra starts to snore. They should make an appointment to check it won't develop into sleep apnea, he thinks, and he very carefully moves her to her back and onto his arm again.


	3. Sunday 7 September 2007

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie wakes up to his ringtone. He’s alone in his hotel room and minuscule dust particles float in the sliver of sunshine of the gap between the curtains. It looks like it’s close to midday and the light is warm molten gold spilling over the carpet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> helo helo helo
> 
> this one is a bit shorter than the other chapters im sorry -_- i just am in love with it so here it is
> 
> im not sorry for how long this took ive had like three mental breakdowns since i last posted
> 
> richie touches his member for self pleasure in this collection of words. if u do not wish to read about that it starts at richie gets a hand on his dick and ends at richie gets his hand off his dick im p sure. u will know. he doesnt even get to come tho so theres that

Richie wakes up to his ringtone. He’s alone in his hotel room and minuscule dust particles float in the sliver of sunshine of the gap between the curtains. It looks like it’s close to midday and the light is warm molten gold spilling over the carpet. 

“Yeah?” says Richie to his phone when he picks up. 

“Hello, Richard,” says Steve and Richie groans. “Melodramatic,” he rolls his eyes.

“What’s up?” asks Richie from under his pillow.

“I woke up with this urge,” says Steve, who has a card reader on speed dial. “This deep want to check on who is going to become my biggest client.”

“That’s sweet,” monotones Richie. 

“So you haven’t had breakfast,” says Steve. “You get so grumpy without it, sweetie.”

“Can’t call for room service with you clogging up the line, you needy bitch.” Richie blinks at the side table. Where the fuck are his glasses? His fingers wiggle over it and bump against the phone cord, the lamp, and then brush over some paper he doesn't remember. Richie brings it close to his eyes and it says MONDAY 11:00 KASPBRAK SON NOT MOM >:( ASK EMMA 4 DIRECTIONS, which sure are words. KASPBRAK, he lets it bounce against his soft palate while Steve babbles on and his mind shows him a little boy, cute, cute, cute, all angry red-faced in a pink polo. Fucking Eddie? Shit.

“Man,” he says to Steve. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See if I fucking invite you to my daughter’s bat mitzvah,” he laughs. “She’ll be so pissed, she thinks I don’t know but she’s been planning to mispronounce every word that can sound like a swear word because she wants to be just like you, so if you don’t come she will literally eat both of us alive.”

“Have I ever told you about the kid I knew that dropped fuck and the mic during his bar mitzvah?” asks Richie and promptly forgets the rest of the story.

“No!” says Steve. “Write that down, we’ll bring it up at the next writing session! I can’t believe you’ve never mentioned it before!”

“It was- Uh, it was a long time ago,” Richie blinks. KASPBRAK, right, and what else? Two pairs of serious little eyes and laughing mouths. Last night, he remembers it so blurry, he had asked if he had friends as a kid.

“...Richie?”

“I’m trying to decide what’s for brunch,” improvises Richie in his best snotty tone. KASPBRAK runs unbidden through his mind, ruffling his memories and looking for one very specific one. Richie can feel the shape of it. He has it, somewhere. “Steve, waffles or pancakes?”

“You’re not fucking baiting me into this discussion again,” says Steve. “But get something with more fruit than whipped cream, man, I fear for your cholesterol. Men that drop dead from a heart attack are men that don’t pay for my yacht. Hey, talking about your literal job, didn’t you have interviews this morning?” 

Ah, there it is, thinks Richie, and his stomach rolls. By virtue of who he is as a person, Richie is a well-versed liar. It comes with the career, it comes with the theater kid, it comes with the addiction problems, it comes with the closet. A few years ago, a successful lie made Richie feel exhilarated.

“Yeah, I didn’t feel so good this morning and asked Emma to reschedule,” he says. “Think I caught something at the airport.”

It’s really gotten old with age, though.

“Damn, those places are literally a virus free buffet,” shudders Steve. “Just as many health code violations, for sure. I’ve told you about the private plane?”

“Yeah, you’ve told me,” laughs Richie. “Yacht, private plane... You know, people have been killed for less.”

“Yeah, you commie sicko,” he says with an eye roll. “‘Oh, look at me, I’m Trashmouth Tozier! I read the Conquest of Bread! I rant about Mao when I’m sleep deprived!’ I can get you blacklisted if you’re not careful. Anyways, are you drinking water? I’m calling your hotel and telling them to bring you some, and I’m asking for some crackers or rice or something, too, no breakfast foods for bitches with tummy aches.”

“Yes, mommy,” giggles airly Richie, pitching his voice just right in that way that makes everyone automatically feel like they should be chemically castrated by the state, and gratefully collects Steve’s pained moans and complaints in return.

“Go shower,” says Steve in the end. “I’m hanging up to call your hotel desk. Tell Emma if something happens, okay? Take care, man.”

Richie lays on his stomach, his phone by his ear. There was something he wanted to do, lost in their banter somewhere, but wiggling around in the sheets only brings his dick to mind. Eh, he has time before room service comes. _Ha, ha, comes,_ thinks Richie and he slips his hand inside his underwear. The guy he made out with yesterday is a good starting point. The lipstick on the cigarette and the way he grabbed his ass at the end like he knew he didn't need permission already have him at half chub. But it's not until Eddie comes in, hanging his jacket by the door and yelling, honey, I'm home, that shit gets interesting. 

So Eddie comes home, okay, and he’s wearing the suit, the one from the airport which was, uh, dark, and fit well. Was his tie grey or blue? wonders Richie and then Eddie gets a finger in the knot and reveals his throat and Richie stops thinking about colors. 

“Honey,” says dream Eddie again, and he reaches out for Richie and kisses his mouth, slips his tongue in. He’s throughout, thinks dizzy Richie. He has shiny eyes and a smile and he looks behind Richie’s teeth and finds something he likes because he laughs, all sunshine, and presses at Richie’s shoulders to get him down to the floor.

“My knees will hurt,” says Richie when he finds his voice again.

“No, they won’t,” says Eddie. “I gave you a cushion, remember?”

When he looks down there is a cushion, electric blue, and there’s Eddie’s shoes, definitely leather, maybe square-toed. And when he looks back up at Eddie he’s still smiling and his dick (his fucking dick!) is showing against the wool. Richie brings up a trembling chihuahua type hand to cup it and his own dick in his real hand is warm and heavy.

“Well?” asks Eddie as his hand falls on his head and grips his hair. "Get on with it, I know you want to, it’s okay.”

If Eddie wore a belt that day in the airport, now he doesn’t, and his tiny pants’ buttons pop easily and then there’s no more pants or underwear but there are sock garters which Richie has always found silly-hot and now are incandescently attractive to him. And there’s Dream Eddie’s dick, thick and curved to the left. Richie takes off his pants and he works himself with deep strokes, breathing heavily into his pillow. The cleaning lady of a certain hotel in New York is soon going to have her morning ruined when discovering a giant wet spot in the sheets of the room of a random comedian. 

Dream Eddie, however, is frustratingly hard to please. Richie wants to get carpal tunnel from this handjob, and he kisses his hips, noses under his shirt. Richie grabs his balls, and mouths at the tip of his dick. Dream Eddie won’t stop smiling at him, not even when he opens his legs to show his wet dick. This is a dream so he knows how to deepthroat and he knows he’s good at it. He gets his hands on Eddie’s ass until his nose is against his neatly trimmed pubes and he presses a knuckle against his hole and gets nothing in return. 

Richie lets his dick out of his mouth, and he pants tired against the jut of Dream Eddie’s leg. A hand pets at his hair.

“Come on,” says Eddie patiently. “I know you want to, don’t you know what I want, sweetheart? Don’t you know me?”

 _Don’t I know him,_ thinks Richie. _Don’t I know Eddie._ This dick he’s dreaming about, doesn’t he know it? He gives it a tentative tug. Where did he say it curved again?

Richie takes his hand off his dick and lets it fall from the side of the bed, brushing with the tip of his fingers the part the sun was warming. The thing is, the last time he knew Eddie he was, what? Fifteen? And now he’s in his thirties and all he remembers is. His hand sweating centimeters away from Eddie’s at the cinema. He was- It was more than a crush, that’s for sure. And he was a horndog as a teenager (have you seen him now? How could he not have been one?) but he can’t remember. He can’t remember ever thinking, oh, I’m attracted to him, as a stupid fucking kid. He just was, and it was the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to him. The loneliest, too. Seeing Eddie again, this blur of a grown man, grim-faced, with the start of crow feet by his Bambi eyes… Richie had been fucking catapulted to the 80s and not in any fun, throwback way. And so he was a horndog. And so he was in love. And so Eddie was, he was…

Eddie was not his only friend. Because across the sunshine spilled on the carpet there was a shadow that flew from side to side, a peregrine falcon, and Stan the Man had once told him those were the fastest animals on Earth.

\-- 

Lately, Myra had not been going to Sunday service. She would stay asleep furrowed in next to him and he would wake up too warm late in the morning instead of by her dressing, putting on one of her pastel cardigans and her mom’s pearl earrings. Eddie should have realized. So this Sunday Eddie wakes them both up at seven. When they spill into the living room, Eddie with his second favourite weekend tie and Myra pretty and put together, Myra’s father is already sitting in Eddie’s armchair staring out the window from where the grey light of the morning crawls across the furniture.

“Maria,” he says quietly, getting up slowly to give her a kiss on the cheek. “I was waiting for you.”

By the time Myra has started the coffee machine, Agata and Declan come down the stairs and soon it’s all five of them standing silently around the kitchen island sipping out of the day to day use cups. They pile up into the car and they drive to the Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. 

Eddie doesn’t really like church. His mother was never one for it. Congregations were too many people, too close, and for all that she was devout, Sonia hated priests with a passion for being both swindlers and communists. Eddie could see the why. Father Call Me Father John Please was the slimiest person Eddie had ever met and he worked in literal finance. It was one of the reasons he was putting off the wedding because Myra just had to have him marry them. But, whatever. Eddie just never knew what the fuck he was doing in church and everyone could tell. He let the others go before him at the baptismal font because he couldn’t remember what hand was used and then had to hurry to sit by Myra at her usual pew, the third one on the left, towards the middle. And then it was the whole show of getting up and kneeling down, to which he was always late. He couldn’t find the hymn to follow along and the joy Father John seemed to take on talking about everyone being a sinner made Eddie frown deeply so Myra had to elbow him to distract him. By the time they reached communion not even the wine could help Eddie’s nerves. 

Afterwards, Agata got distracted by an image of this or that saint being pulled to pieces and Father John had time to intercept them. 

“Ah, Mrs Wilczyńska, Mr Kaspbrak,” he smiled, grabbing one of their hands at a time to shake with both of his. “How is life as fiancés treating you?” And before they could do much more than nod at him, “How have you been Myra? We have missed you these past weeks.”

Myra smiled carefully, her eyes looking around her to check that no one that knew her was near.

“I’m so sorry, I haven’t been feeling all that well, lately,” she laughed lightly. “Wedding planning is stressful.”

Myra had been planning her wedding since she was nine, had a scrapbook, seventeen Pinterest boards and two binders fully dedicated to it. Eddie admired her throughout preparation, always had, always will, but her words made him want to bite the inside of his cheek.

“I understand,” nodded the Father, sparing a look for Eddie, who stood quiet and ramrod straight at her side. Eddie fisted his hands in his pants pockets. “But it is at times like this that one must be more in contact with the church, to help carry the weight.”

“Of course, Father,” said Myra and he grabbed her hand again between his. His neat, minimal manicure couldn’t hide that his hands sweated and he had fingers like sausages, thought Eddie meanly. 

“I’m going to find your dad,” said Eddie, squeezing lightly her arm and waited for her to kiss his cheek before he left for outside.

In the front of the church, people here and there talked lightly in the sunshine while the kids ran around chasing each other. Mr Wilczyńska stood apart from them all staring at some old tree with a plaque saying it was planted in 1898 and Eddie took a deep breath before walking towards him. 

“Myra is talking with Father John,” he said when he put his dark eyes on him. “Agata is looking at the art. I suppose they will come out soon.”

Mr Wilczyńska hmmed, and his eyes jumped across the crowd, smiling at a little girl that was looking at him from her perch on her father’s shoulders.

“Uh, Myra really likes how familial this church is.” Eddie closed his eyes for a second, thankful that his father in law wasn’t looking at him because what in the hell was he even talking about. “There’s a lot of children, young couples starting families... All, ah, all that.”

Now the old man turned towards him.

“I like that, too,” he said and Eddie nodded at him.

Eddie didn’t talk to many men he didn’t fucking hate, he realized suddenly, a pit that opens in his stomach and at the end, there’s a lava river with rapids and a waterfall. Mr Wilczyńska was definitely a man, tall and hairy, and he really didn’t say much to him. When his wife had been alive, Eddie can’t remember them exchanging more than pleasantries, not even during the Superbowl which Declan made them all suffer through every year together. It made the old man revert to polish to mutter things that one didn’t need to understand to know were not nice. Eddie didn’t know anything about football. He had been into baseball in college and he watched the Olympics whenever they were on TV, but football escaped him. Sometimes he wondered if that was because he didn’t have a father and others if it was because he did have a mother that was- One shouldn’t talk ill of the dead, he thought, looking at the little cemetery next to the church. And besides, he had always been a wisp of a thing, especially in high school, so how would he have gotten into football?

Some mother starts to scream after her kid, Mark Joseph Kaminsky, that is by the street crossing stomping his foot because he wants to keep running to the park with some other boys. He has his hand in a blue cast. A littler boy comes with her to admonish him and then, finally, she takes his small hand away from her skirt to make his brother hold it as they both cross carefully to play. 

“So loud,” says Myra, coming out to reach them. “I couldn’t yell at someone like that just outside of church.”

Behind her come Agata and Declan, and they all climb into the car. While they chatter about dinner, Myra saying they would eat steak like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, they pass by the park and Eddie can see the running Mark and his little brother in the middle of the herd of children as they decide, tugging on shirts and arms, to play hide and seek, and then they all run away, leaving behind a pig-tailed red-head, tall for her age, with her eyes closed as she mouths the countdown, and the little brother, extremely confused, deciding to just sit on the ground to await his end. And it’s this tug, this force at the center of his heart, so strong it nearly makes Eddie lose control of the car. He stares at the children until he no longer can’t and he hopes futilely that this is because he is rethinking his stance on having kids

When they get home again his ears still pound and Myra and Agata unceremoniously kick him out of the kitchen. He stands, his hands hanging lifelessly, in the middle of his hallway.

“Hey,” yells Declan from the living room. “Kaspbrak, brings us a couple of brews to enjoy, why don’t you?”

What can Eddie do? Go into the living room, tell Declan to get his beer himself. Go to his office, close the door so everyone hears and knows where he went. Face Agata and Myra and help cut the bell peppers with the biggest knife. Place the table with the country chic linen tablecloth and the informal semi-formal plates and cutlery. Face Agata and Myra for the beers. Go into the living room, tell Declan to go fuck himself. Go to his office, close the door with a bang and listen to Alice in Chains like he’s 17 again. Go upstairs to the bedroom, cry. Go out the main door, leave.

Eddie slinks into the kitchen, hands held placating before him, and he gets two beers and asks Myra to prepare tea for her dad, and he goes into the living room and he opens the beer for Declan who has his hand out for it and he sits in the sofa next to him, his father-in-law in the armchair Myra bought for him without asking him if he liked or found it comfortable, and he locks his eyes on the football match on TV and he opens his mouth and he talks about sports.

\---

After his epiphany, Richie showers in cold water, eats his rice, dresses and gets on the cab Emma sent to take him to his rescheduled interviews to make stupid cock and balls jokes on the radio for three hours, swatting away any blowfly of a personal question like it’s his fucking job. Which, it is. One of the younger, bolder interviewers asks him if he really just broke up with his girlfriend as per his Twitter and Richie nearly loses his shit because he can’t believe people still believe that one. 

“Nah, dude,” he says instead. “She broke up with me.” And he tunes out the comments on bitches and how he must be drowning on pussy, anyway, so fuck her.

When he’s done, he slips out the back door to smoke against the wall like some surly teenager, and he’s about to get on Facebook when Sandy calls him.

“Man, they haven’t aired it yet and you’re already here,” he says when he answers. “I’m still reading Butler so stop fucking sending me PDFs, I can’t keep up.”

“Not my fault you read like a third-grader,” says Sandy. “I heard you weren’t feeling well.”

“Steve is a gossiping old maid,” sighs Richie. 

“Well, yeah, and you’re his mean even older best friend,” she laughs. “How are you?”

Richie puffs out smoke and he looks around the alleyway. A tabby jumps from a pile of trash to the floor and observes him seriously so Richie puts out the cig and gets down on his knees to offer it his hand.

“I went on a bender,” he says finally. “I don’t know what to do about it… Like, what to feel. So, yeah.”

Richie met Sandy at a party eons ago. The circles they moved in were completely different except if you were one thing: a coke user. Their acquaintance was on and off for years because Richie doesn’t actually like parties much and Sandy just couldn’t stand when she got a nose bleed which happened way too much and Richie always pointed out. Imagine Richie’s surprise when he arrives at the detox clinic years later and Sandy is there failing at step up aerobics. And from that point on, they were friends.

“Are you safe?” asks Sandy.

“Well, I am in a New York City alley currently,” laughs Richie, as the cat sniffs at his fingers. “But I’m here to pet a cat, if you know what I mean.”

“Worrying about you is like running a triathlon, I swear,” she huffs. “It’s okay to not know what to feel.”

The cat butts its face against his hand and he scritches between its ears and under its little chin.

“I just don’t feel disappointed,” he says. “I thought I would feel disappointed but I don’t. Like I always knew I would end up here, right?”

“Pursuing pussy in a NY alley? That I don’t believe.”

“Get your yucks in, alright,” says Richie. “ I’ll admit that wasn’t even bad.”

She laughs in his ear and the cat falls down for him to reach its soft tummy. 

“And, uh.” He clears his throat. “Hypothetically…” He sinks his fingers in the cat’s fur, lets the little creature with the teeth and the nails guide him towards a purr.

“Okay?”

“Only hypothetically, what would you do if you discovered you had forgotten at least two people that were really important to you in your childhood?”

“Well, I would say that both alcohol and depression fuck with your memory,” she says. “And I would also probably go on a bender.”

“Mhm,” hums Richie. “Thoughts on looking them up on Mr Zuckerberg’s fun machine?”

“Well, are they the reason you’re afraid of locker rooms, Mr Tozier?” and she says it too softly to make it a tease, which is the reason she will never make it in comedy.

Are they the reason? Not directly. But it’s hard to explain to her, with her professor of gender studies at Berkley mom and her sexy European aristocrat dad (who Richie has fucked) and their amicable divorce and liberated soirées and friends who had been hippies and at May 1968 and now had minimalist brick duplexes, what small-town Maine had been like for loudmouthed, ridiculous, homosexual Richie. He had avoided fucking He-Man, afraid someone would see he didn’t exactly want to be him, for fuck’s sake. 

“No,” he says. “They are not.”

“Then do it, Richie,” she sighs, and because there are some things she does understand, “You really can’t be lonelier.”

**Author's Note:**

> im on twitter as anarcobuffon where i am much less funny than i was here
> 
> dont expect this to update with any kind of schedule or even rationality
> 
> also if any of u r mean abt myra in the comment section im going to stomp u to death with my hooves


End file.
